"I've been looking at the world all my life," says David Hockney, "and what I see is rather beautiful." The English artist became famous thanks to his idyllic studies of swimming pools (and the handsome men who splashed around in them), which he painted in the 1960s and '70s after moving to Los Angeles. In the decades since, he has experimented with space, light, and color not only in paintings, but also in photographic collages, set designs, and luminous drawings made on an iPad.

Hockney's controversial belief that some Old Masters relied on a mirror or a camera obscura to create convincing detail informs his new book, "A History of Pictures" (Abrams), cowritten with critic Martin Gayford. And his multifaceted career—from sensitive portraits of his artistic circle to recent landscapes of his native Yorkshire—is surveyed in his largest museum retrospective to date, which opens in February at Tate Britain before traveling to Paris and New York, as well as a new monograph from Taschen so large it comes with its own book stand. At 79, Hockney shows no signs of slowing down: As he quips, "I'll just go on until I fall over."

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Making A Splash

Richard Schmidt From David Hockney, A Bigger Book

"Garden," a view of the artist's Los Angeles home, 2015.

•I tend to live in the now—painting is in the now. But as I've been putting together this Taschen book, I've looked back at 63 years' worth of work, and I'm quite impressed, actually. They're doing a supplement with another 1,000 images in it. Even then, there's a lot left out.

• There's a continuity to my work that a lot of people didn't notice at the time. Whenever I did a painting and someone said, "It doesn't look like yours," I would think, It will.

• I came out in 1960, when I was at the Royal College of Art. I lived in bohemia, which was a tolerant place, so I thought, I can do anything. And I did. Now bohemia seems to be almost gone. And I think we need a bohemia, because we need other voices.

Seeing Things

David Hockney

A sketch for the set of "Parade," 1981.

• I've always enjoyed looking. When I was eight years old in Bradford, England, and I could go on the buses alone, I always ran upstairs and to the front, because you could see more.

• Nobody can be trained to draw like Picasso or Matisse. But anybody can be trained to draw quite well. Teaching drawing is the teaching of looking. Most people don't look hard at all. They just scan the road in front of them.

• They stopped teaching drawing for a while in art schools. I think they've started again, but it was foolish to give it up after 30,000 years of drawing just because of the photograph.

•Color is a very subjective thing. We all see it a bit differently. I always thought color photography was a bit dull. I don't see color like that.

California Dreaming

Richard Schmidt, From David Hockney, A Bigger Book

"Bigger Trees Nearer Warter," a nine-panel oil painting, 2008.

• I've always painted my domestic surroundings. I did it in Paris and London. But Los Angeles was the first city I painted. When I moved here, I started painting the streets. These were the first palm trees I'd seen.

• I painted the terrace of my house blue in 1982, after I'd been in New York doing the sets for "Parade," a ballet and two operas. For Ravel's "L'enfant et les Sortilèges," I used the colors of Matisse—red, blue, and green. When I bought this house, I used the same colors. The painters thought I was quite mad. But when they finished, they saw how good it was.

• I've got a nice house and studio in the Hollywood Hills. I've got lovely views of the garden. If it wasn't so overgrown, you could look down on Universal Studios, but I like it overgrown. I have a nice life here. I draw and paint, or work on books. I go to bed at nine o'clock. I'm too deaf to go out to concerts or the opera now. So I read a lot. I can hear every word in a book.

Technological Revolution

Richard Schmidt From David Hockney, A Bigger Book

"Untitled, 468," an iPad drawing printed on paper, 2010.

•I've been using the iPad for six years. There are advantages and disadvantages with any new medium. You are drawing on glass, so there is not much resistance—if you're drawing on paper, there is a little resistance, and you use that. But with an iPad, you can set up a palette quickly. You don't need water to wash your brushes, and you don't need to clean up afterward. A few years ago I was living in Yorkshire, and every morning I would see the rising sun out my window, and I'd make drawings of the flowers on the windowsill before I got out of bed.

• When I began to draw on the iPad, I was attracted to sparkling things, like a glass cup. I drew candles and sunlight because they glow, and the iPad has a glow to it. I'm doing a window for Westminster Abbey, and I drew that on an iPad because it, too, will glow.

• I recently asked some friends to sit around a table and drew them on an iPad as they smoked and talked. I never asked them to stay still. On an iPad you can always alter things. At the Tate retrospective we're going to have screens that show playbacks of the drawings being made. It's the first time I've seen myself draw.

• I'm not impressed with virtual reality. You put on a helmet and you can look around, but you don't have a body. If you don't have a body, then who is doing the looking? When I tried one, a monster came toward me and I wanted to touch it. If it had seemed real, I would have run! It's more interesting to keep things on a flat surface. You can still pull people in that way.

Historical Perspective

Tony Evans / Getty Images

Hockney at work, c. 1967.

• Three or four years ago, I suggested to Martin Gayford that we write a history of pictures that accepts the role of technology. Art historians have never asked how a work was made. But a painter asks how. When you realize that Caravaggio used a camera obscura, it brings you closer to him.

•Vermeer's paintings are exquisite. The fact that he used a camera obscura is interesting, but it doesn't make him less of a painter. I'm certain Pieter de Hooch used a camera as well, but he didn't paint like Vermeer.

• I was in Beijing last year. The National Museum of China has a big screen that projects a marvelous animation of an ancient scroll. Previously only one or two people could see a scroll at a time, but now a few hundred can see it at once. So the Chinese are going to discover their ancient art in a new way. China absorbed the Western ways of seeing— television and photography. Now it can go both backward and forward.

First Steps

David Hockney Collection Tate, London From David Hockney, A Bigger Book

"A Bigger Splash," 1967

• I'm thinking of doing a Taschen book of Rembrandt's drawings that would blow them up, because they're quite small. Every one of his drawings is marvelous. Every face is different. His drawing of a family teaching a child to walk is a virtuoso drawing. People today are photographing this sort of thing, but most of the photographs will be mawkish. They won't capture what Rembrandt conveys through his empathy.

• I just did some drawings of my housekeeper teaching her one-year-old daughter to walk. Ordinary life doesn't change much, does it?

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